Skull Shaped Asteroid May be a Dead Comet

A roughly skull shaped asteroid, possibly the remains of a comet, will pass by the earth this November 11th.

On Oct. 10, 2015, astronomers in Hawaii made a spooky discovery: a giant asteroid between 625 and 700 meters zipping through space, that at certain angles looks uncannily like a human skull. – via Quartz

Better late to the Halloween party than never: An asteroid shaped like a grinning skull is set to pass by Earth on Nov. 11.

Asteroid 2015 TB145 was first discovered in 2015, when it zipped within 301,986 miles (486,000 kilometers) of Earth right on Halloween. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory small-body object database, the asteroid’s next flyby will not be nearly so close; it will pass about 24 million miles (38 million km) from our planet. That’s about a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the sun.

The next time 2015 TB 145 approaches Earth won’t be until 2082, when it will pass at about a third of the distance between the Earth and the sun. Its orbit will take it closer to Venus and Mercury in 2024, 2028 and 2037.

Scientists had the opportunity to snap some spooky images of 2015 TB 145 when it first passed the planet, in 2015. The pictures showed a mostly spherical rock with indentations that resembled gaping eye sockets and a nose hole, at least from some angles. …

The “Halloween Asteroid” 2015 TB145, shown here in an artist’s illustration, is expected to whiz by Earth a little later than usual, swinging by on Nov. 11, 2018.

Credit: JOSÉ ANTONIO PEÑAS/SINC

Better late to the Halloween party than never: An asteroid shaped like a grinning skull is set to pass by Earth on Nov. 11.

Asteroid 2015 TB145 was first discovered in 2015, when it zipped within 301,986 miles (486,000 kilometers) of Earth right on Halloween. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory small-body object database, the asteroid’s next flyby will not be nearly so close; it will pass about 24 million miles (38 million km) from our planet. That’s about a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the sun.

The next time 2015 TB 145 approaches Earth won’t be until 2082, when it will pass at about a third of the distance between the Earth and the sun. Its orbit will take it closer to Venus and Mercury in 2024, 2028 and 2037.

Scientists had the opportunity to snap some spooky images of 2015 TB 145 when it first passed the planet, in 2015. The pictures showed a mostly spherical rock with indentations that resembled gaping eye sockets and a nose hole, at least from some angles.

This radar image of 2015 TB145, a dead comet, was generated using radar data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF

The asteroid is about 2,047 feet (625 meters) wide, according to a 2017 study, making it a relative pip-squeak, astronomically speaking. (By comparison, the asteroid thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs was about 6 miles, or 10 km, across.)

The skeletal rock didn’t affect Earth on its 2015 flyby, and the asteroid won’t have any effect on the planet during its more-distant November pass-by. However, researchers have found that the asteroid is not just spooky, but also special. According to NASA researchers, the asteroid’s oblong orbit and its velocity suggest that it might be a dead comet, stripped of its icy debris tail by too many trips around the sun. Comet tails are tails of dust and gas that stream behind a comet due to solar radiation. …

With the number of comet nuclei around our sun, perhaps many of them are shaped like skulls, and others like donuts, square bricks, cigars, star fish and so on.

How many comet cores of various shapes and sizes are hanging out in our solar system? By most estimates around 2 trillion.

The Oort Cloud by most estimates is made up of trillions of icy objects stretching at the inner limit from about 2,000 AUs (earth-to-sun distances)out to almost a quarter of the way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The Oort Cloud is believed to be spherically shaped and to consist of an outer cloud and an inner torus (doughnut-shaped) cloud.

Some day we may mine the Oort cloud. One strange use for comets may be to make Mars habitable. Using gravity tractors to hit Mars repeatedly with comets, some think the red planet can be given a dense atmosphere and liquid water. I think we may have restart the molten liquid core of Mars spinning for the planet to have a magnetic shield with which to hold an atmosphere again, something perhaps farther beyond our abilities currently than even bombarding Mars with comets.

The Oort cloud about six million, million comets and they are much more useful than was at first thought. … The crust of a comet is dust and rock but the nucleus is ice and outside is ice. Ice is frozen water and water is the most valuable substance in the Universe. Water can be split to provide oxygen, which can be used, for colonies and spaceships and space stations. Water can also be used to provide all liquid needs. However, more ambitious ideas are also being thought up. Crashing comets into Mars will in time increase it’s atmospheric density and irrigate the planets making Mars one day a world that can be lived on without the aid of space suits. Also incredible as it may sound, the same idea could be used for Venus.

Most of the precious metals that exist on Earth today may have been brought here by comets and asteroids billions of years ago. At that time, the entire inner solar system passed through a violent phase called the Late Heavy Bombardment.

During those times, vast numbers of comets, asteroids, meteorites and other space bodies battered the four rocky inner planets, causing massive amounts of damage. Most of the largest craters on Earth, Mercury, Mars, Venus and the Moon were produced during those times.

But the LHB also had some positive effects, researchers are beginning to uncover. Some say that vast amounts of water were brought here via cometary ices, and that it was through this event that our planet’s atmosphere and oceans formed.

In the theory that our universe is a simulation, an odd possibility is that we have the power to manifest things with our imaginations, even that everything we imagine instantly becomes as real as possible given other existing imagined conditions.

This raises the specter that there exists not only this skull shaped asteroid, but now also a giant skull-omet of mostly quartz and gold, somewhere out there grinning at the Earth, simply because I visualized it this morning. This is known as Xeno’s Created Giant Golden Skull in the Oort Cloud theory.

Go ahead, create something interesting in the Oort Cloud right now by visualizing it.